Yay Beta

So I got up to GameStop and got my Aion beta key card. Pretty card, actually, wouldn't mind the design on a credit card or something, even if that would auto tag me as an avid geek. Zeke sent me the patcher for Aion last night, so now I'm just waiting for it to patch.

Unfortunately, we have shitty Verizon DSL, so it's only gotten to 41% since starting it; it's averaging about 25 - 27 KBs/sec right now, though last night for a while it was around 70 - 80. *le sigh* So even though I have everything set up through NCsoft's account section, I still have to wait. *pouts*

They couldn't have included a fucking disc for this, now could they. >.<

Facebook Games...That Do More Than Waste Time

So I'm an officer for a Facebook group that collects, verifies and posts information about various Facebook applications/games that actually support legitimate offline charities or causes. Most of these focus either on saving animals, the environment or humanitarian interests, and all of them must have transparent dotnations to said causes to be included on the list.

Most of the games are pretty fun, or at least easy enough to do a little bit of clicking through yet still generate enough to create a donation. Please check out the group Games/Applications Supporting Human, Animal & Environmental Causes on Facebook, and if you currently play or decide to start playing one of the listed games, please join the group and share it on your profile as well as leave a review for the games you play.

Namaste.

Oops!

So, I get pretty horrible about blogging sometimes. >.>

Tony, myself and our friend Randy got into doing some play by post RPs via Facebook for our Star Wars: the Old Republic characters, and then Tony and I started trying to get involved with a few things in Second Life, and of course he'd finally get called back to work (after being laid off for 3 months), and then I got sick after going to the Harry Potter 6 midnight showing...so everything kind of screeched to a hault.

Here's the rundown of geekdom lately!


Star Wars: The Old Republic
We made our main characters, and started work on the Star Wars: The Old Republic RP Wiki profiles, which are largely done but not entirely so. You can view Aradia's profile, Wyntier's profile, Malickai's profile, Arrio's profile, Tsukasa's profile or Angeli's profile already, though not all of them have been linked to the Characters page of the wiki yet.

Almost all of Aradia's biography are summaries of the play by post RPs we did for our background. We have just a few more sections to RP through and the back history will be complete, however since Tony started working again, we ended up taking a break from this for a bit. I'm working on setting up the next round of PBP-RP, but with the differing work schedules of Tony, Randy and Alex, they will take longer and require an actual post order.

Tony, myself and Randy made recreations of our SW:TOR characters in Second Life, not only so that we could add images to our profiles (which I am still working on), but so that we could do some real time RP to get a better feel of the character personalities. However, with the way the Galacitc Unity RP sims are set up, it's proving a bit difficult as most people do not give anyone who comes into play as a Master level Force user the time of day, apparently to the point of the player not being allowed to prove that they're not just god-modding. While I can understand the hesitence when encountering a character that no one knows coming into play as a Master Sith or Master Jedi, I personally can't bring myself to auto-discredit them over it - I'd rather give them the chance to prove they can RP it well, without it being a god-mod crutch.

So we basically are having to tweak our characters, by hiding behind the "Republic" personae we created for them in our PBPs - Wyntier's will end up having to play off being an untrained Force Sensitive Omwati scientists, and Aradia will end up having to pretend to be a wandering Jedi. The state of the various governments in the GU setting is unstable and chaotic, and since Wyn and Dia were previously out of touch due to their research projects, they decided to sit back and see what exactly is happening with the galaxy before chosing a side. We'll probably eventually go over to the Sith if someone can RP bringing Wyntier into training and prove that the Sith are actual worth our time, as there is apparently a bit of a rift between the Sith groups in the GU. Moderately defeats the purpose of trying to real time RP the characters, but hopefully not for too long.


Harry Potter
My friend Jason got tickets to the midnight showing of Harry Potter, so I went along with him and a few of his friends to see it. Personally, I didn't like the movie all that much. It felt very slow compared to the prior movies and the book itself, and they left out and rearranged too much of it for my liking. There was a lot of cool things they left out, some of which are directly tied into the seventh/eighth movies and seventh book that I can't really figure out how they're going to justify and/or correct for the final movies.

Tony was also not impressed, and actually fell asleep during the show when he tried to watch it in the theatre, though he did later on catch it over the internet, which only solidified his dislike of the new film. It's also starting to get into the space of the books that Tony has previous umbrage with, as a lot of things don't quite make logical sense, and several of the sub-plots kind of fall apart when you actually look at them past the Order of Phoenix's midway point; I think it gives him a sort of default dislike of the movies from here on out.

So when I mentioned something about the Potterverse based RP sim in Second Life I'd looked into back in February of 2008, he got fairly interested. Once we got the new information, as the Hogwarts Reborn group had merged with another group to make Hogwarts United, we made up some characters and began the (long) admissions process. They don't use meters like the GU, so they actually want character sheets, along with out of character interviews. I already had my interview, and have moved into the process of getting my "special ability" approved, while Tony's heard nothing; apparently his interviewer is in the UK, but they never seem to be on at the same time anyways. Once he gets his PC back, he's going to be contacting the head of the Admissions department to see about getting a different interviewer.

Hogwarts United has had 200+ applications this month, so...that explains the wait to a degree, but it's still silly long as it's been over two weeks, I think.


World of Warcraft
Back in May, as you can see if you look in the blog's archives, Tony and I began leveling up characters on Hydraxis so we could join our long time friend Tas' guild. The guild itself was only barely getting started, and supposedly wanted to be a progression raid guild that worked off of a casual schedule; they really had nothing in place that was needed for a raid guild, so I started filtering them all the stuff I'd collected about running guilds in general and raid guilds in specific.

Initially, I was trying to divide up my time between Hydraxis and Steamwheedle Cartel, however as it became more and more obvious that the guild on Hydraxis needed work and Tony suddenly had more time due to being laid off, I ended up spending a lot of time on Hydraxis and doing shit to make the guild we joined into a decent raiding guild.

It didn't exactly work out, as the actual guild leader failed to see the reason behind several things, which may or may not have also been unclear with the general guild members either. I wrote a very lengthy explanation on why some things needed to be done, even if they were not "fair" to the few PUG'd individuals that would be brought on raids, why there needed to be gear requirements so people who work hard aren't carrying people, and a few other things. Essentially, people wanted a progression raid guild, but weren't willing to do the work that went with it and I really didn't want to stick around in a sub-par guild.

This lead to the group of us who had come over from the Horde side of the game leaving that guild, and while Randy and Ford could easily go back to their guilds, Tony and I are kind of left in limbo as his prior main is on a PVP server (and I don't like being on a PVP server) and due to issues with an ex-boyfriend, I don't really feel comfortable about going back to Steamwheedle Cartel; we don't have the money right now for either of us to transfer anyways, neither raid force on either server really needs the character classes we have anyways, and we enjoy playing the game together so just logging into our respective servers wasn't really sounding very appealing. Tony also put a shit ton of work into his new Mage, and would prefer to be using that character for playing and raiding.

I looked into several different guilds on Hydraxis as best I could, however the ones with charters and loot systems we liked were all too far along in progression for us to join them, or when I contacted their leadership, they just didn't need a mage and a shadow priest.

Then I got screwed over by a change in an automatic bill I wasn't aware of, so I had to let my account lapse anyways. Since we're still largely in the situation as we were before I couldn't pay for it, neither one of us has bothered reactivating our accounts. If we have the money for it, we might reactivate our accounts when they bring the Faction Changes live since then Tony could play his mage but we could be Horde like all of the people we know. I don't know what server we'd go with, because our friends are split up on different servers ATM, though there was some talk of moving to Malfurion when the Faction Changes go live as a bunch of his friends from the Alliance are going Horde and moving there.

As much as I miss playing sometimes, I just really haven't felt the urge to play WoW again all that much because of it all.


Random Other Gaming
For the past few days, Tony's been without his computer due to a screw up by the place he'd been purchasing it through. He went and made what he was given the impression of being the final payment for the computer, as the salesman had told him that he didn't have to pay anything else...when there was actually 60.00 left on the account from (more than likely) accrued interest.

So back on Monday, while Tony was at work, the company showed up to collect the computer, and his roommate had a stupid moment and just let them in without contacting Tony about it first. When he got home, he found he had no computer, and the next day found out why aside from his roommate's dumbass moment. Unfortunately, his place of employment fucked up on paying him, and have been slower than slugs about correcting the problem, so he has no way of getting it back until his paycheck gets straightened out. That was supposed to be today (after it was supposed to be Tuesday), but the dumb bitch in payroll has had issues being competent and apparently won't have it till tomorrow even though she's had more than a week to take care of it.

In the interim of boredom that has occurred because of it, I've been playing random free to play MMOs, but none of them are holding my attention that well. I love how Requiem looks, I like the storylines of Guild Wars and Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, and I like the general play and systems of Runes of Magic and World of Kung Fu, but after a point, without other people they either get boring or I just can't do anything because it requires a group.


Aion
Last week I pre-ordered this in hopes of getting into the Beta, like the main site advertised. I popped by the local GameStop, threw a few dollars down on it, and naively assumed that my beta info was on the receipt that was handed to me as nothing else was given to me. I was extremely rushed at that point, as Wal-Mart had taken forever and a week to get my medicine pick up ready, and I had to go pick up mom from work but was running out of time before I had to be there. I never looked at the receipt till I got home, and found there was no beta info on it. After poking around NCsoft's site and talking to my friend Zeke, who also pre-ordered, I found out they were supposed to give me a plastic case with a beta key card in it.

So tomorrow I get to call and find out why I wasn't given the beta key card case or told that they were out of them before doing the pre-order. I'm a little ticked about it, but apparently the server is only open every other weekend at the moment, so there's not a huge loss - as long as I get the key tomorrow, I can d/l the software and log in for this weekend's beta round.

I'm hoping that after all the betas, we can keep our characters like they did for Lineage II and I think they did it for one of the Guild Wars. One can only do newbie quests so many times before they get too boring and unbearable.

At least I know I'll have Zeke to play the beta weekend with. ^.^